Can MTC’s Transit Recovery Task Force save our region’s transit system?

“It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” -- Winston Churchill

The inaugural meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Blue Ribbon Transit Recovery Task Force kicked off on Friday, May 29, with Chair Jim Spering quoting the famous wartime leader to highlight how just high the stakes are in the battle to save public transit in the Bay Area.

The inaugural meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Blue Ribbon Transit Recovery Task Force on Friday, May 29. Seamless Bay Area co-founder and policy director Ian Griffiths is pictured on the top row, second from left.

The 32-member task force, which includes local elected leaders, transit agency general managers, advocates, and state officials, was created by MTC in April in response to the urgent crisis facing public transit due to plummeting ridership and revenues during the COVID crisis. The task force’s mission is bold and ambitious: to advise MTC on a recovery strategy that can stabilize and save Bay Area transit.

“The Bay Area economy needs a highly coordinated and effective transit system like never before,” MTC Executive Director Therese McMillan stated in her opening remarks. “We need every customer to have the confidence that transit is safe and understandable; and that every dollar is being used to provide the most comprehensive service that we can.”

Spering described the Task Force’s work occurring in three distinct but overlapping phases:

Determining how the remaining federal CARES Act funding should be distributed among Bay Area transit agencies;
Reviewing and aligning various transit agencies’ near term recovery strategies;
Establishing a framework for a different and better transportation network in a post-pandemic world, positioning transit for a stronger recovery over the long term - including a Bay Area Public Transit Transformation Action Plan and legislation that could lead to governance and funding reforms.

Seamless Bay Area was invited to participate in the task force, as was San Francisco Assemblymember David Chiu, a leading voice for Bay Area transit and a supporter of governance reforms that will improve transit across the region. Organized labor, transportation and housing advocates, business associations, and disability groups are also represented on the task force.

Calls for safety and network planning

During the task force kickoff meeting, several advocates and elected officials reiterated the urgent need for consistent safety practices to rebuild public confidence in transit. Responding to calls over the past month from riders and workers for MTC to lead a coherent and aligned rider and worker safety strategy across the 27 transit agencies, transit agency general managers submitted two joint letters prior to the task force meeting highlighting the close collaboration they had been undertaking -- but without oversight from MTC.

Advocates welcomed the collaboration and emphasized the need for a more structured approach to transit safety, with clear leadership and accountability.

“We’re very pleased to see that there’s unprecedented coordination going on between transit agencies,” said Seamless Bay Area Policy Director Ian Griffiths. “We would love to build upon that coordination and establish interim accountability for the safety of the system as whole -- establishing a regional ‘center of excellence’ for rider safety that could be housed within one of our transit agencies to proactively work across agency lines on rider safety. We would like there to be one trusted voice to speak on behalf of our Bay Area transit system.”

Task force members also called for a coordinated approach to restructuring transit service.

“It’s incredibly important that we establish the essential network for the recovery and that we don’t just lower frequencies by a little bit - or a lot - on a whole bunch of different services,” said Commissioner Nick Josefowitz.

Hayley Currier of Transform also emphasized the importance of rationalizing service to focus on a core network plan, suggesting that MTC “prioritize a core transit service plan that meets the needs of transit dependent riders right now and evolves as the situation evolves.”

The next task force meeting on June 15 is expected to include additional information on how Bay Area transit agencies are coordinating service and safety as the region works to emerge from the COVID crisis.

The importance of governance reform

Advocates, elected officials and state representatives represented on the task force also expressed their support for broader long term governance and funding reforms to rebuild transit in the Bay Area, making a direct connection between recovering from COVID-19 and the goals of the Bay Area Seamless Transit Act, AB 2057.

“I really am grateful that MTC...is hoping to use the frameworks around seamlessness for how we rebuild together in a way that’s going to integrate all of the different systems that we have,” said Assemblymember David Chiu. “I think we all realize that we simply don’t have the resources to rebuild the past. It’s my hope that portions of my bill [AB 2057] will literally become moot because of the work that this task force does; [and that instead] you’re going to be coming up with new and better recommendations that I look forward to embodying in future bills.”

Take action now to help avoid huge service cuts

Seamless Bay Area is looking forward to delving into the longer-term governance and funding questions that will position our transit system for a better future - and we’ll reaching out soon to get more transit riders input on what our priorities for advocacy should be.

However, as we shared in a prior blog post, the most important action you can take to support transit right now is to contact your Congressional representatives and ask them to support additional federal funding to keep transit going in the Bay Area over the next 18 months. Unless Congress authorizes funding for transit soon, the Bay Area may be forced to make permanent service cuts that will hurt hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents and imperil transit’s recovery.

Email your members of Congress now. You can use Transportation for America’s easy online tool to identify your Congressional representatives and generate a customizable message about why transit agencies are in urgent need of additional relief.